Computational protein structure prediction is a long-standing challenge in bioinformatics. In the process of predicting protein 3D structures, it is common that parts of an experimental structure are missing or parts of a predicted structure need to be remodeled. The process of predicting local protein structures of particular regions is called loop modeling. In this paper, five new loop modeling methods based on machine learning techniques, called NearLooper, ConLooper, ResLooper, HyLooper1 and HyLooper2 are proposed. NearLooper is based on the nearest neighbor technique; ConLooper applies deep convolutional neural networks to predict Cα atoms distance matrix as an orientation-independent representation of protein structure; ResLooper uses residual neural networks instead of deep convolutional neural networks; HyLooper1 combines the results of NearLooper and ConLooper while HyLooper2 combines NearLooper and ResLooper. Three commonly used benchmarks for loop modeling are used to compare the performance between these methods and existing state-of-the-art methods. The experiment results show promising performance in which our best method improves existing state-of-the-art methods by 28% and 54% of average RMSD on two datasets while being comparable on the other one.

This paper presents a new fast and accurate web service for protein model quality analysis, called PSICA (Protein Structural Information Conformity Analysis). It is designed to evaluate how much a tertiary model of a given protein primary sequence conforms to the known protein structures of similar protein sequences, and to evaluate the quality of predicted protein models. PSICA implements the MUfoldQA_S method, an efficient state-of-the-art protein model quality assessment (QA) method. In CASP12, MUfoldQA_S ranked No. 1 in the protein model QA select-20 category in terms of the difference between the predicted and true GDT-TS value of each model. For a given predicted 3D model, PSICA generates (i) predicted global GDT-TS value; (ii) interactive comparison between the model and other known protein structures; (iii) visualization of the predicted local quality of the model; and (iv) JSmol rendering of the model. Additionally, PSICA implements MUfoldQA_C, a new consensus method based on MUfoldQA_S. In CASP12, MUfoldQA_C ranked No. 1 in top 1 model GDT-TS loss on the select-20 QA category and No. 2 in the average difference between the predicted and true GDT-TS value of each model for both select-20 and best-150 QA categories. The PSICA server is freely available at http://qas.wangwb.com/∼wwr34/mufoldqa/index.html.

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